A Place of ‘Long-Lasting Evil and Unhappiness’: Rædwald’s East Anglia in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History

The seventh-century kingdom of the East Angles threatened the pan-English Christian unification envisaged by Bede in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Radwald first raised East Anglia over its neighbours, but his pagan and Christian altars scandalized the monastic historian and prompted him to demonize that king and, by extension, the whole East Anglian gens during his reign. The region was tainted with spiritual evil until the mid- to late seventh-century conversion efforts of Kings Eorpwold, Sigeberht and Anna and the missionary initiatives they sponsored. Bede trumpets these subsequent glories to prove to his readers, and likely to convince himself, that the religious ambivalence long characteristic of East Anglia had ceased to be a guiding political imperative in a fully Christianized England.